Wedding Arbor

For those of you out there who do not know me here is a little story. I am the oldest of 6 kids. I love my siblings very much even the ones who drive me crazy. So I try and do what I can to help them with things in there lives. My little sister recently got engaged and married. She and her husband are like all young people I know and do not have a lot of money. So her wedding had to be small and cost efficeint. My wife helped her plan a lot of her wedding from things she needed how to get them ect...ect... At some point my sister decided she was not going to have any kind of alter, stand, or arbor to stand on, under or by when she got married because she was on a budget and to rent things like that cost to much. So my wife knowing how to soften my beat less bloodless heart asked me to make her an arbor. Never making on or anything that big I was a little overwhelmed but went to it any ways. This is what I got.

I knew this was going to take a long time and that I was going to have it after so I wanted to make sure I did it right

I cut all my top pieces out first because I knew that was going to take me the longest to make, I cut all the ends at 45degree angles and routed all the ends to make it look real nice

I then notches into the top pieces to attach them to the support beams

I used 2 kinds of glue for the legs

Gorilla glue and tite bond 2

Seeing that Traves and myself have never made something like this we ran into a few snags one being we didn't know how to put it together once it was ready

But we managed

At this point I was feeling pretty good about how it was going

At some point of this build Traves taut Ethan how to use his electric drill we set up some screws for him on his work table for him to take out and put in and he thought that was pretty awesome so after I had put the trellis on the side he found the screws and started taking them out, I only found out after he handed me a hand full of screws with a big grin and wanted me to put them back in so he could take them out again I laughed for a long time after that and let him help

I wanted to hide some screws so I drilled out the holes

then filled them with dowels then sanded them down I didn't get a picture of the sanded down but it hid very well

this is it ready for stain

Ethan helping

how can you get mad at someone who looks this cute

After one coat of stain

the top buttons have 2 coats the bottom has just one

so like all projects I do this took me longer than I thought it was going to but like I said I really wanted it to look nice, so when I stained the trellis I bought at the store and it looked awful I panicked because her wedding was a week away and I didn't know what to do, so i looked up a bunch online to see other ways people have made the sides saw one I liked and made a quick run to the lumber store

After 2 coats of stain

I was literally working on it the night before her wedding so I forgot to take pictures after my trellis problem happened so this is the only picture I have with it finished and by itself

This is my little sister and my new brother